


If you were from where I'm from (then you would know)

by Dr_Roslin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: All that's left is the HEA, All the girl friends are over, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, And my fourth year of university, And perhaps more smut, Angst, Based on a Reylo prompt, Ben is the sounding board, Blue skies and sunshine guaranteed, Broken-hearted, Comfort Food, Dating, Drinking, Enjoy the HEA, Entire consensual if a little drunk, Entirely consensual but just in case that might make you uncomfortable, Even more giggling than drinking, Everyone is drunk and he is feeding them food, Except for Finn and Han, F/M, Fluff, Food as Love, Giggling, GingerRose?, HEA, Han Solo is a fucking delight, Heads up they are drinking and they will be kissing, Houseparty, I would remind you, It's BSD, Just tooth-rotting fluff for the most part, Kinda New Girl, Kinda Three's Company, Maybe a little StormPilot, Mind the rating change to E starting in chapter 5, No Pregnancy, Older university student, One apartment, Otherwise I would add like 10 more, SO MUCH HEA, Seriously so much drinking, Single, So fluffy and so much HEA, So much drinking, The boys show up in the epilogue, The girls might be getting matching jackets, There aren't enough women in Star Wars, They are making him do shots, Three girls and a guy roommate, a little melancholy, and kissing, but - Freeform, guaranteed, just for fun, mostly cameos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:15:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Roslin/pseuds/Dr_Roslin
Summary: Ben Solo loves living in campus housing with the mighty triad of Rey Johnson and the Tico sisters while he returns to Law School for his final year after almost ten years away. The year's coming to an end, though, and he still can't figure out how to get his brain to work around Rey. And he's already agreed to move in with her permanently at the end of the year. Platonic-aly.It's the final day of classes, the BSD parties are in full swing and chaos is about to ensue.Based on the following prompt:Ok but I need a reverse new girl reylo AU where Ben moves in with Rey, Rose, and Kay/Jannah. Really I just need any fic where Ben is roommates with a bunch of girls. Anybody want to write this for me?@reylo_prompts— jen ✨ (@jennyb_b8)June 20, 2020
Relationships: Jannah/Paige Tico, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 31
Kudos: 96
Collections: Reylo Prompt Fills (@reylo_prompts)





	1. This is how we do it

**Author's Note:**

> Did I mention how there's not enough women in Star Wars? There AREN'T ENOUGH WOMEN IN STAR WARS! I put everyone I could think of in here and there's STILL NOT ENOUGH! If you think of anyone else my treacherous brain missed, please let me know. 
> 
> Based on the Reylo prompt (and my living situation 4th year of my undergrad, though obviously in real life, and I CANNOT STRESS this enough, there were WAY MORE WOMEN!).

**BEN**

There was entirely too much giggling going on in Ben Solo’s apartment for 7:30 on a Friday morning.

He’d been awake for a while, just casually scrolling through his phone, catching up on emails and his (admittedly) limited social media presence. It wasn’t unusual for him to be up this early, he enjoyed the morning sun and the quiet, his chance to recharge, drink some coffee in peace before he headed off to the snake pit that was senior year at Law School at U of C. It was unusual for his roommates to be up anytime before 10, and they were usually in somewhat of a sleep-deprived stupor even then, so he wondered why they were clearly up, and awake, and must have been for some time. 

Plus, the giggling. There was a great deal of giggling going on, more than one might think possible before coffee.

Curious, he had just decided to get up and check on their progress, wondering idly if someone had thought to put on a pot of coffee, when the gentle tapping on his door started. Or what his three roommates probably thought was gentle tapping.

_Wait, were they scratching at his door? What the hell –_

‘Benjamin.’

‘Benji.’

‘Benny.’

‘Benny-boy.’

‘Benny-maroo.’

‘Benjamin Organa Solo. You’d better get your ass out here.’ 

That last one set off a whole new round of giggling, and finally deciding to let his curiosity get the better of him, he rolled his ass out of bed, remembering as he went to pull on a black t-shirt from the chair by his desk to go with the sweats he normally slept in.

Opening his door, he didn’t bother to hide his grin at finding his three roommates sitting cross-leg in an impromptu camping circle outside of his door. They looked… well, a little plastered, if he had to guess. At 7:30 in the morning? It was the last week of the semester, but still… _Was he missing something?_

‘Benny!’

‘Bennnny!’

‘BENNY!’

They all managed to gain their feet, though he could swear he saw each them sway a little as they all tumbled into his arms, as he carefully kept them from falling into the frame or his door or worse. They were all significantly shorter than he was, Rose Tico being the smallest at 5 foot 2, her sister Paige topping out at a relatively average 5 foot 4 and even at 5 foot 7, Rey Johnson still only manages to reach his chin. Despite this, he still had trouble juggling all of them, the booze he could smell on all three of them clearly making them a bit wobblier than usual.

‘What is going on with the three of you? It's not even 8 in the morning.’

He’d seen them drunk before, hell, he’d been drunk with them before, but this seemed to be out of character, given that the sun was just barely peeking over the horizon. He’d been up late, had sent them all off to bed at 11:30, the chorus of ‘Goodnight, Ben’ lingering through the apartment long after they’d closed their doors, making him smile as he’d cracked open his study notes for the torts exam he had next week. He had no idea how that had led to this; the three of them still in their pajamas but clearly tipsy, chanting his name and apparently prone to burst into giggles. 

‘Ben, Ben, Ben.’ Paige burst into giggles again while repeating his name. ‘It’s just such a funny name right? But you’re not funny, right, Ben? So serious…’ She reaches up to use her fingers to push his mouth into a smile. ‘Turn that frown upside down!’

‘Paige, I swear to God – ’

Rose takes pity on him, at least he imagines that’s what she means to do, grabbing his hand and hauling him the short distance into the kitchen where – thank God – he can smell the coffee already brewing. The banner they’ve hung is a bit crooked, but he can still clearly read the block letters spelling out:

‘HAPPY FIRST BSD, BEN!’

They chant it in some semblance of unison as he smiles wryly at them, amused despite himself. He leans down to kiss each one of them dutifully as they present their cheeks to him before ushering them over to the kitchen table where he sees – yup, the largest container of yukaflux he’d ever seen, the 20 pound Rubbermaid container crammed to the brim with cut-up fruit that he can imagine has been marinating overnight in various liquors, given the smell which wafts through the small kitchen.

There are also three plastic champagne flutes and a half-drank bottle of cheap sparkling wine sitting next to a bottle of orange juice, which explains the giggles. Rose can never handle sparkling wine, it hits her like a ton of bricks, and Paige drowns it like water, which means it hits her so much harder later. Rey – well, Rey laughs the loudest once she pops the bottle, which is why it's always her job. (He’s sad he’s missed that part, but then, he’s always sad whenever he misses out on Rey laughing.)

He smiles at her now as she refills the glasses before handing her one of his own. He hates mimosas and they know it, but they also know he’ll indulge them on special occasions.

‘Really went all out, eh?’ he teases her, indicating the plastic glass, which may be from the dollar store but still feels delicate in his hand given how his monstrous appendage overwhelms it.

‘Wait!’ Rose cries out as he raises the glass to his lips and he stops automatically, happy to obey her and defer to her in the role she’s taken on as Master of Ceremonies.

‘Ladies and gentleman,’ she continues, only slurring slightly, ‘we are happy today to initiate our beloved roommate Ben Solo into the age-old tradition,’ she glares at Ben as he snorts, ‘of Bermuda Shorts Day, the final day of the Winter semester and the beginning of summer. Let us all get monstrously drunk today of all days, before Ben makes us take our studies seriously and chains us to our desks as the exam period begins.’

And with that the giggling starts all over again before all three girls raise their glasses to salute him as he raises his glass in return.

‘To Ben!’

‘To Ben!’

‘Benny-maroo!’

The last one comes from Paige, the most mischievous of the three, and he smiles at her, thinking again of how much he loves all three of them, as he salutes them in return with his plastic glass, draining it in one go to get it over with and he can move on to the coffee tormenting him with it's tantalizing smell.

Paige Tico, the most outgoing, the most mischievous, the most willing to let bygones be bygones, but also the most studious, her beauty and charm belying the fact that she has the most brilliant legal mind he’s even seen. Complications and perspectives that he has difficult even following she comprehends and articulates in an instant, and her written arguments are so sharp on the page that he wonders why they don’t draw blood. Beautiful, brilliant and charming, she'd also the most likely to leave her keys on the counter as opposed to in her bag, and he's lost count of the times one of them has had to come and rescue when she'd locked herself out of the building. She can't cook worth a damn, she's impatient, unyielding and direct and she’s the one most likely to get him to agree to do whatever they want, which is why they usually send her to pressure him to join them at the never-ending social events she perpetually organized.

Rose Tico, his best friend, who is both a perfect complement and a perfect foil to her sister, smaller in stature and quieter in personality, but who is the most loyal person he’s ever met, and the most likely to call him on his bullshit. She has a habit of pulling him down by his collar so she can get more in his face when she needs to yell at him, something she’s been doing more often these last couple months for … reasons, and she has the unnerving ability to get him to come out of his shell, even when he would prefer she not. He only tells her this when he's drunk, but he’s forever grateful she found him in the Campus Residence lounge and convinced him to sign up to be the unlikely fourth in their apartment-style dorm. He huffed. He’s not entirely sure he had a choice in the matter, to be honest, he doesn’t really remember agreeing to add his name to the application (he’d been thinking he’d find a bachelor apartment off-campus and had gone to the session on a whim), but somehow he’d ended up here, though he sometimes felt like a over-sized lumbering beast surrounded by his outgoing, petite roommates. 

Rey hiccups, breaking him out of his reverie, and he realizes that as adorable as the three of them are, he’d better get something solid in their systems before they’ve not choice but to tap out before the day even gets started.

‘More coffee,’ he orders them, pointing at Rey to get her moving towards the cups and ignoring her detour to the fridge to get the –

_is that Baileys Irish Cream? Shit, this was going go downhill fast if he didn’t get them moving towards the food._

‘Toast,’ he orders Paige next, pointing to the bread box on the counter. 

‘Rose, you and I are on omelette duty. Grab the eggs, the cheese and the left-over ham from the fridge and I think I left some cut-up peppers in a container on the second shelf in here. Grab those too.’

Heating up the grill, he ignores the smart-ass remarks coming from all three girls at once as he concentrates on whipping up the eggs, adding the other ingredients, making the largest omelette he can for them to share, family-style. It’s not the prettiest he’s ever made - he usually tries to add a little more flavor and a bit more garnish - but he figures that in this situation speed counts more than finesse, particularly since he’s sure Rey adds more than a couple of shots of Baileys to their coffee and Paige is laughing too hard to butter the toast properly and argues with her sister as to whether peanut butter toast counts as lunch. Rose, Rose just winks at him conspiratorially as she hands him plates and sets the table, and he knows he’s in trouble, so he frowns at her, trying to ensure she behaves herself instead of spilling _all_ of his secrets. 

Eventually, he corals them all over the table and watches in relief as they devour the eggs and toast, relieved to see the solid food is doing its job as he cajoles them to eat and drink the water he pours for them, though the girls are still just as giggly. Just more relaxed. As he drinks his third cup of coffee, he relaxes to some degree as well, grateful that he poured it himself and can therefore enjoy it black after all the Baileys Rey had tried to pour down his throat. At ease with them and himself, he unbends enough to dig out a bowl and grabs some of the alcohol-soaked fruit, which he has to admit is surprisingly tasty, an opinion which elicits a new round of teasing on their part.

‘You’re letting down the side, Ben,’ Rey leans in to tease him, even as he tries to focus on not swallowing his spoon, ‘if you don’t catch up soon, we’ll have to get you to do a couple of shots.’ 

‘Body shots!’ Rose chimes in, and he glares at her, though as usual, she ignores him.

Just his luck. His old co-workers used to refer to him as the Beast from the East, and meanwhile he can’t manage to intimidate three 23-year highly intoxicated women just finishing their undergraduate degrees. He shakes his head at them and starts cleaning up, making quick work of the dishes and shaking off their offers to help, happy to lean against the kitchen counter and enjoy his coffee and observe them as they plan his first (and last) BSD.

‘He has to go the beer gardens – it’s tradition! His BSD won’t be the same without it.’

He'd never met one so hyper-focused on tradition as Rey, and he'd wondered at it before he'd understood she'd always have to make her own as a substitute for ones not passed down. 

‘The beer gardens are always such a mess, and it’s supposed to start drizzling this afternoon anyway,’ Paige counters. ‘Why don’t we do the indoor pub run? Kaydel and Jannah have set it up – you stop at a party in every residential building and end the night at The Den.’

Ben winces a bit – this sounds like his worse nightmare, even without it ending at the campus nightclub he can’t stand – and he’s trying to think of a graceful way to nip in the bud the party-hopping his cousin Jannah and her roommate have set up when he happens to look at the clock. Somehow it’s after 10, and if he hopes to make to his final constitutional law class he and Paige will have to start moving soon. 

Looking over at her, he’s not sure she’s totally up for it, but he knows Amilyn Holdo is a stickler for attendance, and she’d made a comment on Wednesday (that he'd failed to understand at the time) that everyone had best be there for her Friday 11 am class.

‘Paige. Shower.’

Hopefully that should sober her up enough, and she should be able to make it across campus and through the hour-long class, especially if he stays with her the entire time. He hopes.

‘Rose, Paige and I have to make it to this class, but you and Rey can get ready and then we’ll go with whatever you two decide when we get back.’

He might regret giving them carte blanche (though when does he ever deny them?), and they all pout at him, but it gets them moving, albeit slowly. As he hops into his own shower, grimacing a bit as he sees the reflection of his hair in the mirror – had it really been standing straight up like that with his ears peeking out this entire time? - he tries to ignore the memory of how Rey had stuck her tongue out at him.

Rey Johnson. The third leg of his roommate trio and the embodiment of his every feverish dream and every waking nightmare. Rey Johnson, adorably tipsy and getting drunker. Rey Johnson, who liked to cuddle him every time she drank, who never stopped touching him the moment she had so much of a sip of wine. Rey Johnson, whom he’d agreed to move in with when they all moved out of campus housing at the end of month since Rose and Paige were investing into a small condo together.

No. This wouldn’t be a problem at all. Totally not at all.

_Sure, Ben. Sure._

He is well aware the truth behind this statement. He's been well aware for months that he is totally fucked.


	2. Designated driver take the keys to my truck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **BEN’S SEROTONIN BRIGADE**

Ben gets Paige through their last class, even though the coffee in the to-go mugs Rey slipped them on the way out turns out to be mostly Baileys and even through Holdo looks a little askance at them the entire time. (Though he imagines her coffee is mostly Baileys, too, given how short she cuts the class.) The lecture hall is barely a third full and that’s despite all the warnings he’d heard Holdo give them over the past week, but he imagines the rest of the student body is consuming as much booze as his roommates have been. The beer garden is jumping, even in the light drizzle that has started, the loud music echoing across campus, and everywhere they go he sees groups of students wandering around in Bermuda shirts (including him and Paige as Rey had insisted on dressing them before they left), and what looks suspiciously like beer in the to-go cups in their hands, despite the preponderance of campus security.

He manages to get Paige back across campus, though they have to make several stops, the longest one the result of Paige stopping to spend way too long petting the chestnut horse of a Mountie whose patrol has been called in to make a sweep across campus. All in all, it’s a fun experience, the morning of his first BSD, though he’s slightly leery about what’s to come. Given how drunk Paige was getting, he’d no idea what to expect from Rose and Rey, who might have been drinking the entire time they’d been gone for all he knows, and he really hopes he can convince them all to stay in, have Kaydel and Jannah over and play drinking Jenga, which at least might allow him the opportunity to keep feeding them.

(And hydrating them – he’d managed to get Paige’s ‘coffee’ away from her for the duration of the class, but even still, he’s going to need to get her to drink at least a litre and a half of water once they get home, as apparently they’d consumed a lot of yukaflux before they’d gotten him up. 'They were tasty,' Paige had told him. 'You should have had more, you need, like, WAY more food than the rest of us.' She'd suddenly looked worried, looking up at him from half a foot down. 'Did you get enough to eat enough this morning? You're such a mountain, you don't eat enough. Maybe we should get you a chicken on the way home. Remind me to talk to Rey when we get home,' she'd told him, and patted him gently on the arm where she'd linked hers through his, as if he was the one who needed guidance, and he'd resisted the urge to pat her back gently on her tiny shoulder.)

He doesn’t remember there being this much of a party at the end of the year when he'd done his undergrad, or during his first two years of Law School, but then again it had been over 7 years since he’d dropped out of university the first time. He knew he wouldn’t have paid much attention at any rate. He’d finished High School at 17, his undergraduate at 20 and he’d been finishing his second year of Law School when Christian Snoke, one of the top litigators in the country had come calling. Even at the time, he’d known that Snoke was most likely feeding him self-destructive swill when he’d turned his head with all that talk about the brilliant prodigy of a mind Ben possessed. Still, he’d allowed him to convince him that he could skip his final year, article for Snoke's firm and then go straight through to taking the bar.

Snoke had been right in some respects, Ben had been able to qualify as a lawyer less than a year later, mainly through the prodigious use of caffeine and 80 hour weeks, though after the spectacular flame-out of his informal apprenticeship with his former mentor, Ben had realized he had to go back and complete his degree if he ever hoped to rediscover his love of the law again, let alone hope to gain any credibility in the industry. It also meant he’d have to take the bar again, which he'd do this summer after his classes are over, though mercifully, they’d count his time practising law as his articling in this case. (He'd found out recently this was largely a result of his mother's influence with the review board. She was determined to drag him, kicking and screaming as need be, into the light, and if it meant throwing her weight around for one, well, that was apparently a price she was more than willing to pay.) He wasn’t keen on having Snoke, LLC on his c.v., but he’d little choice in the matter, given the eight years he'd spent there, so he'd just have to find a way to live with it. Decision made, he’d signed up for his final year, decide to look into moving into student residence to limit both his expenses and his distractions, gone to an information session and had fallen straight into the warm nest that was the Tico-Tico-Johnson matrix. And, even though it was exactly what he’d sworn he’d avoid, he’d found himself loving every minute of his time spend with them.

All of which he reminded himself as he watched Paige obsessively stroke the soft, dark brown nose of the Mountie's horse, seemingly oblivious to the joyful chaos that surrounded them. After distracting her with the promise of take-out hamburgers though, he managed to get her and a large sack of the delicious smelling burgers (and onion rings, she'd insisted) back to their place. They were then promptly set upon by both Rose and Rey, who quickly descended on the tasty food in the bag, which satisfied both his need to feed his rambunctious roommates and ensure they had something to soak up the copious additional amounts of booze they’d consumed both this morning and in the hour and half since he and Paige had left for class.

He'd long since found a way to hold back his shock at their eating habits, noting how they’d taken the label of starving student to heart. At some point in October, he’d taken over the cooking and grocery shopping duties, ignoring the budget they’d all set for him and kicking in extra to make sure they ate _some_ vegetables. He usually only managed it during dinner, but that allowed him to encourage them to eat something that wasn’t either sugar or highly processed. (Though to be fair, they’d managed to con him him into eating hamburgers more often, his personal kryptonite. He caved to the temptation they set in front of him every couple of weeks or so, and thought it a small price to pay to watch them all eat the food he made for them.)

He’d let it go the first six weeks, the urge to badger them to eat real food, and he thought his therapist would have found his self-control in this regard quite praiseworthy. He’d finally broken after the first three weeks of October, though; mainly since, with the arrival of mid-semester mid-terms, all three of them had gone into stress-driven vegetable-avoidance overdrive. The day he’d come home to find Rey eating licorice for dinner, for the _seventeenth_ time in a row, _might_ not have broken him, at least until he remembered she’d done the same for lunch for the _seventeenth_ time as well ( _I'm not really hungry, Ben_ ), mixing it up at breakfast with coffee, milk and peanut butter on white toast. He'd then looked over at Paige, who’d just finished her usual meal of bagel bites - she hadn’t even bothered with a different meal when she’d gotten out of bed ( _Bagels are breakfast food, Ben_ ) - and Rose, who was again stuffing her face with popcorn and calling it dinner ( _Corn is a vegetable, Ben_ ), he’d finally snapped and made them a homemade pizza and used it to bribe some salad down their throats.

‘I thought BSD was meant to be a marathon, not a sprint,’ he’d attempted to point out now, but to no avail.

‘Benny.’ The look Rey gave him could cut glass. ‘BSD is a tradition, a rite of passage, a sacred – Damn it, Rose, I need another word for tradition - ’

‘- ritual, ceremony, practice – ’

He snorted. 'Ritual' had been the word Rose had used when she’d came back from visiting her and Paige’s aunt on the East Coast with a live lobster in her carry-on and had insisted that they have lobster races across the kitchen floor before popping the poor creatures into the boiling water waiting to cook them. He would never be able to eat lobster again, he’d told her, she'd ruined it for him for life, and all she’d done was laugh.

‘ – ritual, a sacred ritual – thank you, Rose – that we all must complete as part of our time at uni. You have been denied your true enjoyment of this practice by the misdeeds of your earlier, younger self, the misdeeds of your youth, I would say and -'

'We didn't want to say anything,' Paige interrupted looking up at him with a serious expression, placing a understanding, reassuring hand on his knee, seemingly in preparation for gentle reprimand she seems ready to deliver, 'but we have serious concerns about the decisions that past-Ben may have made.'

'Indeed. We say this with love, Benjamin - '

'So much love,' Rey kicks in.

' - but it is true we are very disappointed with some of past-Ben's choices. Very disappointed. We understand the reasoning behind them, clearly, but still; we are very disappointed. Past-Ben has a great deal to answer for,' Rose pointed out, glaring at him, as he bends his head to give her what he hopes was a reasonable approximation of puppy-dog eyes, attempting to look properly bashful in the face of her ire. 

'Exactly! Exactly!' Rey cut in to pat him lightly on the shoulder before continuing '- and so we must address these grievous failures that your younger self is responsible for, Ben. It would be a sin for you not to have the full BSD experience. And, dear Benjamin, as you are apparently unaware, as part of this sacred practice, if you don’t wake up with a hang-over tomorrow morning – now say it with me, girls – ’

They all chimed in, Rey pointing her soggy onion ring at him to emphasize their final conclusion –

' - You’re doing it wrong.’

He laughs and, as he watches them dissolve into giggles once again, he thought again about how he’d laughed more this last year, even with all the stress of learning the theory behind all the law he knew in practice, even with all the stress of dealing with hundreds of students almost a decade younger than him in age and seemingly decades younger in life experience, with all the family and emotional stress that came with acknowledging that you had made some very serious mistakes that you now needed to atone for, not to mention the inherent stress that came with going back to school when you were almost 30 and not 18.

He didn’t know what he’d have done without the three women arranged at the small table around him, currently as drunk as fuck and scarfing down take-out like they hadn’t eaten for days. Paige’s mascara from this morning was already smudged; it didn’t look as though Rose had managed to get all of her make-up from yesterday off in the shower; and Rey’s oversized Hawaiian shirt had managed to fall off both of her shoulders at once. Collectively, they were a mess, hair pulled halfway up into messy buns (although Rey had apparently decided that one bun wasn’t enough, so she’d gone all the way and put in three which made a shaky line down the length of her neck); all in shorts and ugly polyester shirts which would look out of place in Honolulu; make-up either non-existent or non-removed; they were all slurring their words; and at least of two of them were currently using the rungs of his chair for foot-rests.

It should have been making his obsessive need for order and symmetry go a little wonky, but instead all he could think was of how they all felt like sturdy daises when they’d gathered around to hug him in unison this morning. (Hell, that alone should have made his skin itch; he was not comfortable with people touching him. Rose had started it the first day when they’d all moved in, though, and he’d found it strangely comforting ever since.)

Shaking his head softly, he cleaned away the wrappers and fry containers from the hamburgers and onion rings as his three roommates returned to their comfortable bickering as to the proper order of activities on BSD. The beer gardens had looked a bit soggy, so he was a relieved when Paige was luckily able to convince the other two that her dragging him past them on the way counted as him having partaking in that particular tradition. His tentative suggestion that they all take a bit of a nap to rest up for the remainder of the day was loudly shouted down, unfortunately leading to Rose leading the others in a rousing chant of ‘Shot! Shot! Shot!’ They'd kept it up until he took his punishment (‘Proud of you; you took it like a one of us, Solo,’ she’d praised as he grimaced at the taste of the tequila - apparently Rey had been delegated to buy the lime but had forgotten - and slapped him on the back until he saw stars), and he’d laughed with them even as he wished they hadn’t bought the world’s cheapest liquor (students or not). As as reward, they agreed to once again chug glasses of water, though they complained again that he was a _spoil-sport_. 

By the time he’d gone to the washroom, checked his phone and returned to the kitchen twenty minutes later, though, he knew they were goners. Sitting on the floor in front of the fridge, campfire-style as they had been this morning, were his three roommates, each with a cheap shot glass filled with something that looked remarkably like Pepto Bismol.

He had a sneaking suspicion that the shot glasses did not, in fact, contain Pepto Bismol.

‘Benjamin.’

‘Benji.’

‘Benny.’

‘Benny-boy.’

‘Benny-maroo.’

'Benjamin Organa Solo.'

They burst into giggles once again as Paige completes the ritual (they find his complete name hilarious, apparently) before grabbing his hands to pull him to sit with them, which he does, despite the fact that his knees protest the very thought. He’s too big for the floor, hell, he’s too big for the kitchen, hell, they’d used to tell him he was bigger than the fridge, yet they somehow find way to make room for him.

‘You’re back!’ Rey tells him and he smiles at her, despite the fact that the floor is hard and she is sooo pretty and he is not nearly drunk enough for this and that this close to them he can smell what’s in their glasses and see the distinct look of the half-frozen bottle at Rose’s side, the condensation dripping off of it.

Tequila Rose. A noxious combination of cream and artificial strawberry flavouring and cheap tequila, which is the colour and general texture of Pepto Bismol, with the added benefit of tasting of well, chemical, is the only way he can think of to describe it. Paige had talked him into trying a shot of it during their first week as roommies, when the girls had first discovered it, and he’d sworn to all of them he’d never choke down that shit again. Luckily, he sees Paige has a shot glass of regular gold tequila, and though he doesn't really want it, he takes it gratefully as an alternative as he gives into peer pressure and presents his glass to clink against theirs as they raise them in unison.

‘To the end!’

‘To the beginning!’

‘To the end of the beginning, but not the beginning of the end!’

It had been their motto since before he’d moved in, before he’d met them, the inspiration from the introductory level English Lit class Finance Major Rose had been subjected to as a mandatory elective and yet had somehow loved. They’d added a corollary in his honour though, at some point during the last year, and hearing it now warmed the cockles of his shrivelled heart, which, like that of the Grinch, had somehow magically grown three sizes since that day he’d cautiously moved in with these three firecrackers who’d deigned to keep him.

‘To the beginnings after the end!’

And they drank as one. 


	3. It's Friday night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, my husband did something adorably Ben Solo-like, so I had to rewrite a little bit so it fit in the story.

He lost of track of them a bit after that; although they flitted in and out of his orbit, as the rest of their friends flooded in an out of their apartment, from both on campus and off. Their apartment turned into party central, apparently out of deference to the rain, even though as a compromise they’d agreed to give in to Rey’s insistence that Ben should experience the beer gardens should the rain ever stop. It didn’t look like that would happen though, and so they all cozied up together in the utilitarian apartment as the group ebbed and flowed, depending on who was tapping out to go home and pass out and who was dropping by to eat from the never-ending tub of yukaflux. Mostly they talked, and sang along to silly music and razzed on each other. The girls with each other too, but mostly on Ben. Meanwhile, happily buzzed, he watched over them, his roommates and their friends, his friends, and if he watched one roommate out of the corner of his eye more than he did the others, who was to know?

Kaydel Connix and her roommate Jannah, his cousin, lived down the hall, and had shown up mid-afternoon. Their classmate from Law School, Phasma, had shown up shortly after, unexpectedly he thought, though Paige had greeted her like a long-last sister. He smiled at the picture they presented, arguing some sort of constitutional law point with Jannah looking on indulgently as her girlfriend took the other girl to school. (Selfishly, he’d loved it when Paige and Jannah had gotten together, one more connection to tie them all to him, one more way to tie his found family to his biological one, as they all basked in the reflected warmth of their unquestionable devotion.) 

Rey was curled up in the kitchen, once again sitting on the floor leaning against the big refrigerator, her arms draped over Rose and Kaydel, one on each side, as they took selfies and debated the best angles as they checked the results on their phones. They’d called him over to take a ‘proper photo’ as Kaydel had put it ('stop being such a brooding mountain'), and pulled him in for a few with them and Jannah ('it's the advantage of taking selfies with you,' she'd told him, 'you're such a meaty oak tree and your arms are freakishly long.'). Apparently after all of that, they’d decided that a more ‘natural’ shot was better for Kay’s Instagram, so they were going through the entire process again.

Meanwhile Bazine Natal, another Law School compatriot, was fighting over the proper application of the old-school temporary tattoos with Zori Bliss, Rose’s oldest friend and Bazine’s newest acquaintance, as they tried to apply them to each other’s cheekbones. It didn’t help that they were both quite drunk, meaning that they kept pulling off the backing too quickly, too impatient to let the tattoos fully adhere to their skin.

Maz Kanata, the building's super, had shown up earlier as part of her sweep of her building, checking on all of them, and had lectured them all on responsible partying, the effect only slightly marred by the fact that she'd been unable to stop giggling at Rey's antics. (That girl could not listen to a lecture without rolling her eyes, it was a known truth.) She'd teased Rey about that, and Ben about the Tequila Rose shots Paige and Baz kept trying to get him to drink, before continuing on her rounds, though she'd promised to stop by again to check in and maybe try some of the yukaflux.

They were all fading a bit, the booze and the early hours and the emotions of the day taking their toll, but no one was ready to call it a night yet, nowhere near to have this day end. It was a last hurrah, in a lot of ways, though there would surely be more blow-outs after the exam period was over and they all had to prepare to move on with their lives. They'd all shared this experience, this university lifestyle for the previous few years, other than Ben, and he could tell they were grasping at the edges of it, even as it all slipped away. It was hard to have that sort of life, those friendships, that sort of connection, once you weren’t living the life of university student.

He selfishly wished he could keep them all here, together. Where he cooked and drove them, all squished in the back of his car, Rey always insisting on curling up in the middle of the backseat between Rose and Paige while Jannah sat in the front ( _she’s tallest,_ they’d insisted) and they came back from class and vented about their day and their significant others and who’d hit on them and who hadn't and who'd they'd hit on when they’d gone out dancing. Or when they’d run through the back alley with pizza to keep it warm after they’d gone clubbing to meet him where he had the car waiting for them as always to pick them all up. And they told him things he wouldn’t know otherwise and they let him cook for them and occasionally sent him out to buy them tampons and he told them things he wouldn’t have thought possible to tell anyone, and they all kissed him on the cheek and pretended he was a good person and was worthy of their confidences.

They were all here, gathered around them, and was doing the best he could gather them all up to keep them happy and supported and safe. Which was funny, because if anything, they were his support system, rather than the other way around, but old habits died hard and the ways in which his father’s old strictures echoed in his ear could not be denied. He supposed that everyone had been drinking since around the same time as his roommates, and he was grateful that at most of them were still standing. He was also relieved that, despite their best efforts, Bazine and Zorii had been unsuccessful at getting anyone to commit to the bar hop they’d been hyping since they’d arrived.

It was past 8 now, though, and it looked like he’d nipped that idea in the bud, unwilling to give up any of his time with the women who filled his apartment with laughter and his heart with joy. They’d be splitting up soon (given how drunk some of them were), not just for the night but for good, as they all moved into jobs and apartments and relationships and life, but he wasn't ready to let them all go. 

He shook his head, looking at Rey. The same was true of them. She’d been accepted as junior partner for one of the cities top consulting engineering firms (she was so happy she’d glowed), and he had a practice to build. It would be a 180 from his time at Snoke’s firm, but at least he’d still have a chance to regain his soul. He owed his parents that at least, after all they’d done for him since he’d showed up, hat in hand, on the doorstop of his family home after the fall-out of his time with old snake, and what he owed himself.

Lost in thought, he hadn't noticed Maz had come back and was now sitting comfortably at the kitchen table with Jannah and Rose while Rey did her best hostess impression, serving Maz coffee from the pot he'd kept refilled as much as possible, giggling all the while. Heading in that direction to say 'hello', he suddenly stopped in his tracks as he caught the edge of the story with which Paige was regaling Maz. Even as he tried to beat a hasty retreat, though, Maz grabbed his wrist and hauled him over, her grip as freakishly strong as ever despite her tiny stature.

' - so he texts back saying 'yeah, that's not going to happen - '

' - but he didn't say it like that, it was, like, written with perfect grammar and punctuation - ' Rey cut in. 

' Well, yeah,' Paige told her, before turning back to Maz. 'You know what he's like. Not an emoji in sight.'

'They're telling me what it was like to move in with you,' Maz told him, looking at him with an amused gaze out of her massive coke-bottle glasses. 

'Yeah,' Paige continued. 'So, it was like the first week, and Rey had read this article in Cosmo - '

' - Excuse me, Teen Vogue.' 

' - yeah, yeah. They had this hilarious article about all the things men would and wouldn't do for the women in their lives. And so we decided to put Benny-boy to the test. You know, since he's such forlorn block - '

'What have you all been reading? "Forlorn block, meaty oak tree, brooding mountain"?'

Paige hand him her phone even as she kept telling Maz the story, and he glanced down to see the 'Things you should call the men in you life' challenge. Well, at least they hadn't decided to call him a big unwashed buffalo, he supposed, but still...

'Relentless hillock? What did that even mean?'

'It means you, you big unwashed buffalo, you relentless hillcock, you,' Rey kicked in. 

' - so he's such an unacceptable monstrosity -' Paige continued.

'Nice!' Rey told her. 

' - Right? We had to put him to test. And I gotta say, he did it all - held our purses, went shopping with us when we went to buy underwear - ' 

'That's impressive right there,' Jannah interjected, and he did his best to glare at her, even as he felt the edges of his ears, thankfully hidden underneath his hair, go bright pink. 

' - Anyway, so this was the ultimate test. So we had Rey - '

'Thank you.'

'- text him to get him to buy her emergency tampons.'

And as Maz laughed so large he was worried she would choke on her coffee, he felt his entire face flush. 

'Oh, you menacing obstacle, you.'

'Yup,' Rey chimed in, 'clearly you are an irredeemable steer.' 

'Wait!' Jannah suddenly yelled. 'You know who should hear this story? Where's my phone? Paige, where's my phone? Oh, right, it's dead. Give me yours,' she suddenly told Ben, holding out her hand imperiously. 'Your mom NEEDS to hear this story.'

And looking down at all the impatient faces looking up at him, Ben thanked his lucky stars he'd managed to keep his phone in his pocket and out of their hands. 

'No.'

'Ben.'

'Disappointed in you, Ben.'

'Your mom would love this story, Benny,' Maz told him, and they all stopped to stare.

'You know my mother?' Ben asked, suddenly bone-scared.

'Oh, my sweet summer child. I've been here for years. I remember when you mother and that Amilyn Holdo and that Lando boy staged a sit-in the Engineering building. I was here when they took over the Registrar's office in their third year. Such nice children.'

_Oh God._

'We are not calling her.'

'Fine.'

They all pouted, until Jannah suddenly remembered their weekly family dinner. _I'll conference you all in so you can help me tell the story_ , she promised, and Ben fought the urge to slam his head down on the table until he got a concussion. _Great. Just great._ His mom was going to have a field day. So would the rest of the family - he could only imagine what that dinner was going to look like. 

'So you know how guys are like around tampons - '

'Unh, yeah. I had a guy make fun of me for having them in my bag after he went in without asking looking for a pen.'

'Did you hit him?'

'Duh.'

'That's nothing. I had a guy make fun of me because we ran into each other at the Pharmacy and I had some in my shopping basket.'

'Seriously.'

'Please. I brought this insanely hot guy home, and everything was proceeding just as it should, and then he went to the bathroom and then when he came out he made a point of making fun of me because I had a box of tampons under the sink. Of my bathroom. In my apartment. Where he was trying to hook up with me,' Rose told them.

'How much did you hurt him when you threw him out?' Maz asked, apparently curious. 

'Oh, I pretended he was funny - har, har, then I made him eat me out first. Promised him the best blow job of his life. _Then_ I threw him out.'

'Respect,' Rey told her, and they all tilted their glasses at her in homage and Ben stared at them all and tried to sink further and further into his chair.

'Guys. Never get over being twelve. But Benji, here,' Paige said, seamlessly picking up the thread of the story, 'this nasty shed, did none of that.'

'Nope.'

'Nope. He flinched at first, but _then_ he got Rey to text him a pic of the box so he would buy the correct type, _then_ he went to three stores, and _then_ he asked for guidance from the _female_ sales clerk, and _then_ he did the math to see whether it was cheaper to buy it as a jumbo pack. _Then_ , and only _then_ ,' she continued as she patted Ben approvingly, 'did he deliver them to her. With a bottle of over the counter pain meds. Just to be safe, he said.'

'The clerk recommended them,' Ben mumbled, staring at the table top and not at his roommate.

'Wait, wait! That's not the best part!' Paige waited for a moment, judging her moment. ' _Then_ he FaceTimed Rey and made her go through all the types of tampon brands on the shelf so she be sure she was getting the best ones for the best price and what the acceptable alternative ones were all _so he would be prepared for the next time_.' 

And as that set them off and he blushed and hoped for a different topic even as they _all_ patted him in approval and Paige kissed him on the check and Rey gave a side hug from the seat over and Jannah told him that his mom _had_ to hear this story and Maz tutted her blessing, and Rose proclaimed him _the best man ever_ , the only acceptable man, really, and he kept his eyes down and reminded himself that he'd asked for this. That he'd miss this.

And he sent silent thanks to Rose as alwyas as she handed him another drink and wrapped her tiny arms around his shoulders to snuggle cheek-to-cheek in an affirming embrace. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm completing the John Oliver challenge with this one, though saving 'fuckable redwood' and 'pensive bison' for the next chapter for REASONS


	4. I'm kinda buzzed and it's all because

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Call out to the Blackberry because 1) Canadian; and 2) honour of my boss' insistence on keeping his.

She wondered if she could steal his phone.

He was a little drunk; more than he would admit, she was sure, and meanwhile the phone was just sitting there, on the coffee table. She knew it was his, she could tell from its plain black case, so different from the everyone else's, covered in anime covers or stylized designs from the 50s or delicate rose gold designs or, as in the case of hers, an otter box which continues to do little to protect her phone from the damage it had already incurred. (To be fair, she’d bought it used; it had already been a year old and its previous owner had apparently been quite clumsy. It had been dirt cheap, though, and you could barely see the scratches.)

Ben's though, is a sleek, new, top of the line iPhone, encased in a sturdy black Otter case of its own meant to provide the ultimate in protection. He'd argued with them when they’d gone with him to pick out a new phone, so they'd had to gang up on him, ensure they could force him to ignore his instinctive default preference for an Android and insist he get an Apple. (At some point early in the process, he'd made faint arguments for a Blackberry of all things, but thankfully Paige had nipped _that_ in the bud.)

_‘It’s so much easier for us to coordinate if you get an Apple,’ Rose had insisted, before playing her trump card, though she’d thought Rey hadn’t heard her. ‘And cheaper for Rey, since she won’t have to pay extra for messages to an Android when she has an Apple.’_

That had been the clincher, apparently, but no, no, nope, Rey is not letting her insecurities dissuade her from her current mission. She may be a little drunk herself, but she is getting her hands on Ben’s phone. She will complete her mission, set in motion this morning by her compatriots in arms.

It had been an ongoing game, this year, between the three of them and Ben. He was too conscientious for his own good, really, and they were on a bit of a mission to change that.

 **Step one** : phone.

Getting him to commit to the iPhone helped. So did getting him to give them all his pass-code, which really hadn’t been that difficult. And then, despite all that transpired between the three of them and his phone and no matter how much he threatened them and glared at them and mock growled at them, he never did change it. Nope, never did. It stayed the same, that simple code that made it so easy to for them to unlock, so easy for them all to do that job they all deemed necessary, her most of all.

It's not like they messed with him or his phone, in general, it was just this one little thing, the only thing they changed. It was just…

He was just so stubborn.

Looking casually at Rose, Rey reached out to deftly snag Ben’s phone, trusting her friend, roommate and compatriot at arms to do her job and keep the overly large sequoia they lived with distracted so she could escape to one of the two bathrooms in the apartment and do her job.

Carefully locking the door behind her, she made haste to unlock her treasure, sure she could get it back before he noticed it was missing. Opening it and navigating it to the contact section, she flicked a disparaging look at the contact name he’d inserted for the group chat devoted to the four of them.

**Ben’s Serotonin Brigade.**

_Oh, Benjamin._

She wasn’t even sure exactly what that meant (she was an engineering major, not a fucking English lit undergrad), but nevertheless, it sure as hell wasn’t correct. (It was better than what it had been last week though, which apparently had been **The Doomed Occupants of 4B**.) Grinning like a pirate, she changed the contact name back to what Rose had programmed it to last week, which happened to be the same that Paige had programmed it for the week before. Which was the same that Rey herself had set for the name of the group chat the week before that.

**Ben’s Bitches.**

It would be a lot simpler if he just let it be, no matter how much he protested it wasn’t appropriate for him to call them that even with their permission, hell, even with their insistence. As it was, they had to take turns changing it back. He was a whole-ass stubborn man, though, so she guessed they’d just have to keep doing it. They’d less than a month left of this, the most comfortable living arrangement she’d ever known, and she had no intention of letting him ruin any part of it with his stupid ethical scruples. 

Satisfied, she made sure to flush the toilet and wash her hands, and, satisfied that her cover was safe, she casually slipped the overly large phone ( _just like its owner_ , her traitorous brain supplied), into her front pocket and covered it with her overly large Hawaiian shirt. Patting it securely and satisfied that it was safely out of sight, she unlocked the door before casually swinging it open.

And promptly stepped, fully and completely, into the phone’s redwood-shaped owner.

_Damn. Why did he have to be so big, for?_

Trying to stay cool, she looked up, way, way, up, into his face.

‘Sorry, Ben.’

‘Unhh. No problem. Unhh, sorry, Rey, my fault.’

Wait, were the tips of his ears normally that red? Looking at the flush across his pronounced cheekbones, she put it down to all the booze they’d all been drinking.

‘Poor Ben. We really shouldn’t have made you finish that bottle of tequila.’

He grinned a little, at that, and she basked in his smile. It was probably goofier than usual (half a bottle of tequila would do that to you), but the gap-toothed grin warmed her up from the inside, just as it always did. Looking up into that smile she had to wonder if they’d been doing it wrong, this entire time.

Shaking her head, she imagined how that conversation would go, even as she pretended to let him steer her back to the living room where she casually dropped off his phone on the kitchen counter and _reminded_ him where it was once he started looking for it.

_Yup, I saw it on the counter, there you go, Ben._

_So, Ben, I know that we’ve been friends for a year, and we’re moving in together, platonic-ally, and I know that half the reason you’ve always been comfortable with us is that we don’t stroke your biceps obsessively the way that girl at the gym does, and that I’ve never caught you staring at my tits the way that pervy T.A. from sociology does, but, I, really think we should have spent the last year with you inside me_ and _I just really, really, really think I love you, ok?_

She snorted.

Yeah, that’d work. 

Fine, this was fine, totally fine. So they’d move in together and she’d get over it and pretend not to notice all the pretty girls who insisted on flirting with her brooding mountain of a roommate and pretend not to notice that he tried to be kinder than anyone she’d ever met, and hotter than anyone she’d ever met and that even when he lost his temper he did his best not to hurt with his words when he lost that battle and lost his temper more spectacularly than any man had a right to. 

She’d be able to do it, right? Pretend not to notice when he would eventually bring home one of the series of classy girls she was well aware his mother Leia insisted on trying to set him up with? Pretend not to notice when they ogled him, when they stayed over in his bed and he kissed them with those plump pink lips and they played with his wavy silky hair and got wrapped in his massive arms? When they wandered out the next morning in his shirt to hang-out and watch him to make his world-famous pancakes meaning she had to make small talk with them? This was totally doable right?

Sure, sure, right.

Yup, she’d totally be able to do it. Totally not a problem. Not a problem at all.

Not at all.

She’d just make damn sure whatever apartment they chose had really, REALLY thick walls.

***

She’d lost him the crowd a little, after that, even as she got a little sober despite herself, the impact of the yukaflux and the baileys and the mimosas and the tequila and the rye fading, her buzz falling away as the evening hours progressed. She found herself sitting on their cheap living room coffee table that double as an ottoman for their feet no matter how much Ben protested that it could not be sanitary. Ignoring for the most part the rye and ginger in her hand, she amused herself watching all the people making themselves comfortable in her home.

Paige and Jannah were cuddled up on the couch, Jannah’s arm wrapped around her much smaller girlfirend’s shoulders, while Rose sat in front of them on the floor, enthusiastically explaining her latest theory on men, and then laughing as her sister told her she was full of shit and she should just pretend her ex had gone off to die in a hole somewhere. It shouldn’t be as funny as it was, except for the fact that Jannah couldn’t help but to chime in with the funniest disparaging remarks on the ex in question and still manage to throw in some shade at Rose for not asking out the redheaded T.A. from her marketing class that she’d had her eye on all year, ethical boundaries be damned.

Ben was sitting at the dining room table, such as it was, his knees almost hitting the underside, hemmed in for the most part by Kaydel and Bazine and Zorii as they grilled him on his view of the latest celebrity scandal while Phasma stood and openly laughed at him. He was trying to gain Rey’s eye, she was sure to make the universal signal for her to come rescue him. As yet, though, she was too amused to cave and go get him and he wasn’t drunk enough apparently to ignore all the rules of polite behaviour she was positive Leia had drilled into him since birth. Finally deigning to let him catch her eye, she raised her glass to him in silent salute. Let him suffer a little more first. She’d rescue him eventually, but he could suffer a bit for his sins first.

Damn fluffy-haired pensive brooding bison-shaped man. Sitting there and looking all stupidly fine.

She stuck her tongue out at him, just the tip, not enough so anyone else would notice, just enough so he could see her reaction to his predicament, before laughing a little into her drink. Knowing that he would know her well enough to know that she’d come to get him eventually, she used her best impression of the mind-trick she’d seen at the movies to send him her mental curse.

_Suffer, you stupidly large beautiful man._

“I’m going to get you for that later,” he mouthed at her, and she laughed at him, though he probably wouldn't hear it over the dance music that Jannah and Zorii had declared necessary if they weren’t going out. Giving in, she wandered over, though she left him sitting between their two friends.

‘Really?’ she asked coyly, looking down into his beautifully expressive eyes, darker in this light than they usually were, their light amber colour fading almost entirely into the same colour of his pupils, making them look almost dark chocolate.

‘Really,’ he confirmed, the smell of the tequila on his breath still mostly noticeable though it had faded under the weight of the smell of the coffee he’d switched to, which almost distracted her from her focus. She always told him, that it was okay if he lost control, from time to time. That he didn’t always have to be the responsible one, that he could loosen the leash his inner daemons a bit.

‘My daemons were loose too long,’ he always responded when she made that joke, frowning just a tiny bit, though the frown which always accompanied the cocky comeback continued to worry her. It relieved her, though, that he was comfortable enough to joke about his previous life, in his own way, the slight inflection and the sarcasm indicating he was trying to let it go, all the guilt and anger about his past life.

‘To the beginnings after the end!’ She reminded him now, as she always did, and he laughed again.

‘We should get it cross-stitched on the pillows for our new couch,’ he told her, and she felt it again, that pull, that sense of light and joy warming her heart, the sense of home, no matter how temporary that sense of home might be.

'Every new beginning is some other beginning's end,' she sang in response. 'We'll have pillows with both slogans everywhere. Besides. The good news is that you'll never have to be that guy again.'

He might leave her, eventually, she thought, a little melancholy with the booze and the song and the softness of her last BSD wrapping around her almost as a physical being, their last month together as roommates with Page and Rose. Ben might leave her, after he met Ms. Perfect, leave her to buy the perfect home with his perfect bride, with the perfect career who would decorate it perfectly and the two of them would make perfect little chubby babies for her to play with, to call her Auntie Rey while she buried her feelings for their father so deep they didn’t interfere with her tangential connection to their perfect family life.

She tried her best to shake it, the sense of depression which crept in from time to time. _Too much, booze, Rey, too much booze and too much time to think_. Yes, he’d probably leave her eventually, destroy what little sense of home she’d manage to build with him, but that didn’t mean it had to be _today_. Or tomorrow. Or next year. People left. They just did. The key was to enjoy them while they stayed.

Yes, he might her for that perfect life. Leave that to the solitary life she was always trying to escape. But not tonight. Tonight he was all hers.

Jumping up, she almost smashed her head into his chin, but refusing to be dissuaded. Grabbing his wrist, she tugged him (and yes, it would probably be easier to move an actual tug boat, stars he was big and solid) towards her phone, plugged in where she’d left it in the socket just inside his room next to the door that entered into the common areas.

‘I forgot! Oh my God, I almost forgot. I found it! It’s perfect. It’s meant for us, I can’t believe I haven’t shown you yet. Sit, sit, sit, sit,’ she told him, forcing him to sit on the floor with his back resting on the open door, allowing her to open up the house hunter app and show him the apartment she’d found that morning while she was waiting for him and Paige to return from class.

They’d been obsessing the last few months on finding the right place, and though it was getting closer and closer to the dateline they’d set to pick one, and she'd yet to find anything that was in her words, perfect, she hadn’t lost hope. She’d known it was out there, their perfect place, and she’d been determined to find it, no matter how many times Ben had told her that anyone she picked would be perfectly fine, that he wasn’t fussy. 

_I don't even take up that much room, don’t worry about it. Whatever works for you._

_‘Yeah,’ she’d told him, looking at his long legs and his big shoulders and his fluffy hair and his massive thighs and his big feet._

_‘I can see how you’d fit anywhere.’_

_She’d surprised a laugh out of him with that, her frank appraisal._

_‘Just think of me like a Great Dane,’ he’d told her. ‘Seriously, we had one when I was a kid and we lived in this tiny apartment in Manhattan. We fit anywhere. We just like to be near our people.’_

_‘Un-hunh.’_

And now she’d found it. The perfect place. Perfect location and perfect price and perfect decor and perfect everything. Everything they’d wanted in this, her first grown up place. (It wouldn’t be his first grown-up place, she was painfully conscious of that, knew he had this whole life before he’d wandered into their lives, knew it had most likely been more posh than she could ever have dreamt, fancy as fuck, most likely, in that life he was so self-conscious off, in that time before he'd wandered into Rose's orbit and had decided to keep them all. Hell, she knew he could likely, _probably_ , afford a fancier place than they were looking at _now_ , probably could afford to get his own place, if he wanted, if he didn't feel such an obligation to take care of her. But she tried not to dwell on that, too much.)

There was just one tiny problem, though she was sure they’d be able to work around it, once they put their heads together. They were two smart cookies, right? They’d be able to figure out this minor problem once they put their heads together. Plopping down to sit beside him, she mirrored his body position, matching up butts and legs and thighs and torso so she could stretch the phone cord as far as possible, even if she had to duck under his arm and cuddle into his side to do so.

_Breathe, Rey. This is totally normal. Just two friends and a knock-off phone cord from the dollar store that was shorter than it really should be._

“Look at it, Ben. It’s beautiful.’

It has a balcony, a large one, one perfect for a little table and a couple of chairs, there’s a place for a cozy love seat in the corner where she could cuddle into the evening with a throw well into the fall. The parquet floors gleam in the photos, and the little kitchen is just as cozy as a dream. It’s warm, inviting, the pictures, taken in the afternoon sun, showcasing it’s simple functionality and charm. It’s just a standard, small little place in an old concrete apartment building, but it’s much, so much more than she could have imagined. It’s lovelier than she’d ever thought possible. It’s home; it’s secure and it’s welcoming. It’s the apartment she’s dreamed off for her future. It’s safe and it’s ready for her to just take it over. It’s _perfect_.

“Look, it’s in the perfect neighbourhood; just two blocks from the train for me and the downtown from you. It’s, like, so close, to the park by the river and it’s like, a short walk from your favourite farmer’s market, you know, the one where they bring in fish from the east coast every two week? And the park is right there for you to go running, and they have everything, and we wouldn’t have to do anything, just move right in. It has great reviews, and the Walkable score’s perfect, and they have brand new security features and we wouldn’t have to worry about going in the back door. It’s even on the fifth floor, which is great, ‘cause I know you don’t want an apartment that’s over the 8th floor, and I know the kitchen’s small, but I think we can make it work, we’ll get an island, you see how they’ve set it up with that table, and I can even maybe help you by, like, helping you by, um, chopping things – “

And she knows that she’d babbling, but it’s so perfect, and she wants this so bad, and she’s panicking as he takes the phone gently in his massive paws, and oh, god, he’s zooming in to see the details and the amenities, and there it is, right there in the right corner, the one fly in the ointment and she’s panicking and she rushes to intercept him before he can bring it up.

“- and I know it’s at the top of our price range even for a one bedroom, but I’ve done a lot of thinking, and I’ve really decided that – ”

And she doesn’t get the rest out, her brilliant plan, because he’s kissing her and she can’t remember anything other than this minute, can’t want anything else than this moment, which is sweet and perfect and everything. With his plush pink lips melding with hers and the taste of tequila on his tongue, and she’s already decided to just climb into his soft black hoodie, cuddle up into his chest and have him wrap his strong arms with his massive biceps around her and live there forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dr_Roslin writes kissing challenge - stay tuned!


	5. To all my neighbours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Drinking and sexual activity  
> There has been a lot of drinking previous chapters and there will be smut in there. If you're uncomfortable, you can end the chapter at 'And she kept laughing even as she hauled him close enough to her to close his mouth with her kiss.'
> 
> You won't miss anything other than my attempt to write reasonable smut.

She won’t deny she’s stared at them, spent too much daydreaming while doing so, over this last year, at those brilliant, soft, plush-looking lips which seemed to have been put on this planet just to torment her. They’re just as soft as she’d imagine, just as red, the tequila and the lime he’d drank that night adding a tang to the natural sweetness she found herself drowning in. Without thinking, she tilts her head slightly, looking for a better angle as she parts her lips and his tongue darts in, and then, ooh, his hand, somehow larger than her entire neck is there, bracing her at the crown of her head, tilting it further, the better for him to take over the kiss. It turns suddenly hot as they’re exploring each other, and her eyes are closed, the better to experience the sensation, as the feeling of his hand on the back of her neck sends shivers up her spine and it takes her a moment to realize he’s pulled away, ever so slightly.

And as she goes to chase him, she opens her eyes to better see, and she's looking up into his glorious amber brown eyes, but he’s just staring at her, stock still and seemingly waiting for – something – from her. God, he was gorgeous, her fuckable redwood. Before she can overthink it, she’s dragging his lips back to hers, reigniting the kiss as his hands dive back into her hair to again grab the back of her neck as she plays with the hair at the back of his neck. Which is insanely soft, she thought in wonder, sinking again into the warm feeling of the weight of his lips on hers. A moment later, though, as his other hand creeps up her back to haul her closer, the caress feeling like the warmest of weighted blankets, she finds she can’t get _enough_. This kiss, hot and perfect and drugging the blood in her veins with completeness, this kiss alone is still not _enough_.

So, she shifts and he helps and she finds herself in his lap, and, oh, that is so much _better_. Still not _enough_ , but _better_. But this way she can shift the angle, and his massive arms are already wrapped around her, cradling her closer, and she can almost melt into him, his warmth sucking her in. Oh, yes, this is so much _better_. She is going to stay here forever, just live off this feeling. And then he bites her lip, just gently, more a nibble than anything else, and her brain stops and all she thinks is _mine_ so she nibbles just a little bit back, just a little bit harder, enjoying the way he shudders as his body surrounds her. So when he tilts her head again, the force of his hand just a little harder than it had been the last time, she gives in eagerly and is rewarded as the angle lets his tongue tangle with hers just that much more, changing the kiss perfectly. And then, suddenly, his mouth is gone, and she whines, but he nuzzles into her neck, sucking gently on that magically tender spot where her neck meets her shoulder, and this time, when she moans, it’s because she can’t remember what it’s like to feel anything other than pleasure or to want anything else than the delicious sensations currently flooding her body.

She’s shifting to move her weight more fully into his arms and his lap, to get closer, to get leverage, to get _friction_ , to gain a better appreciation of the erection she can feel pressing against her thigh through their clothes, when they’re suddenly a voice coming from that space over their heads from the hallway outside his door. Suddenly he’s shifting her, seeming to want to hide her off to side, putting her in the lee-side of his massive bulk as familiar voices intrude in their moment. It's only then she realizes how obvious it would be to anyone with eyes exactly what they had been doing the moment before.

‘Hey, Rey, did you see – ’

Paige is gaping down at them, and then Rose is there, dragging her away, though Rey swears she hears the older Tico sister protest that _it’s about time_.

A little stunned, Rey looks up at her once, present and future roommate as she sits, tangled up in his large limbs in his comfortable lap, and smiles at him the happy smile of the cat who got at the canary.

‘So – ‘

‘Rey - ’

His mouth opens to form words, but apparently, he can’t find them as he chews nervously at the side of his mouth instead, looking at her with a look she can’t decipher but she hopes is anticipation. Giggling, she’s about to reach out and claim his mouth with her own again when they both hear it.

‘You’d better get your respective asses out here before Paige comes to get you,’ Rose yells even as Paige interjects something about pizza and bread sticks and sucking face.

Laughing, Rey, tries to get up from where she’s just spent the most amazing five minutes of her life, though she falls a bit, given how they're all tangled up in each other, before reaching down to grab Ben’s arms to ‘help’ him get up. He looks down at her from his towering height once he's fully upright, and she can’t help but to reach up, standing on the tip of her tiptoes to smooth some of his dark brown hair back from where she’d ruffled it thoroughly, marvelling again at how soft it is and how he subconsciously leans into her touch.

 _How was he allowed to have hair that soft,_ she wonders fondly as she goes to drag him back into the living room. _Gimme_. _Mine_.

‘Come on, I’ll tell you my brilliant plan for the apartment while we order the pizza, and then later – ’ and maybe it’s the booze but she feels so good she winks at him, forgetting how silly she usually feels when she tries to flirt. ‘Anyway, I figure we can negotiate with the landlord on the rent for the two bedroom and since we don’t have to pay for gym memberships – there’s one on the main floor of the building, which I knew you'd appreciate as a safety issue - we can probably swing it if we push the very, very top of our budget. It’s just so perfect we should go see it as soon as possible, make sure someone doesn't snatch it – tomorrow, can you do it tomorrow? You'll just to drag yourself away from the library – ‘

‘Wait, wait, Rey,’ and he drags her to a stop for a second. ‘That’s your plan for the apartment? What you meant when you said you were thinking about us?’

‘Uh, at the time, yeah, I was thinking it was a pretty good plan and we could work out a plan to swing it together. Though now,’ _god he’s gorgeous_ , she thinks as she smiles at him and gets distracted by how soft he looks as he looks at her, ‘I’m wondering about other things.’

‘Rey, wait - ’ but she ignores him and drags him into the kitchen where she can’t help but notice the shit-eating grins on the faces of her other two roommates.

 _Fuck it_ , she thinks. He’d made it pretty clear, this amazing man, that he wanted her, and she didn’t care who knew she was planning on keeping him.

***

Later that night, as she snuck carefully into his room through the partially opened door, careful to avoid the knowing gazes of her other roommates, she could only think of kissing him again. He was already in bed, though, the blue light of his screen lighting the edge of his room, and so, suddenly shy, she was already moving to wave at him and back out –

_God his hair looked great like that, sticking up in a thousand different ways, so different from the way he was always careful to keep in down in waves to cover his precious ears_

\- when he looked up at her and she nearly had a panic attack.

_Oh, god, what if she’d imagined the whole thing?_

‘Rey – ‘

Anxious to reaffirm that what she’d done, what they’d done, was in fact real, she suddenly rushed up to him and pressed her mouth to his, relief surging through her as his arms wrapped around, manhandling her carefully as he pulled her much smaller frame in to him to nestle against his massive chest.

And oh, she didn’t imagine it then, that sigh of relief.

‘Listen,’ he said, and she felt the rumble of his voice in her chest. ‘Tell me I’m not imagining things, Rey, because I swear you kissed me back earlier – ‘

‘Unh, yeah – ' she told him, thinking of going in for another.

‘Good,’ he told her, cutting her off in a rush, ‘because I think I misunderstood something and if, Rey, I swear, if I was wrong, just, I’m not good at this sometimes, and I know I’m, like, me, and you’re young, and bubbly and so beautiful, and –‘

‘Ben, just shut your mouth and tell me what you did.’

‘I kissed you – ‘

Again, she looked at him.

‘Uh, yeah.’

 _Thank the gods._ That’s how they’d ended up here.

‘That’s how we ended up here.’

‘Yeah. Well, the thing is, when you, um, when you said, um, one bedroom, my mind, kinda shut down, and, it’s just that, I’ve wanted, to you know, like, forever -‘

And she had to smile at him, her articulate roommate rambling on like a fifteen-year-old boy trying to ask a girl to prom. There was only one thing for it, really. She leaned into him to kiss him again, curious to see whether it would taste as sweet as it had the first time.

_(Spoiler alert: it did.)_

‘Ben, I’ve wanted to kiss you like that since the first time you smiled at me.’

‘Oh. Um. Okay. Um. Ditto.’

She burst out laughing, covering her mouth as she vainly tried to keep it from ringing through the now quiet apartment.

‘“Ditto?” Really, Ben?’

‘I just – ‘

‘I mean you were born before the internet was invented,' she told him but patted him gently to soften the blow, 'but you're not from the 50s.'

'The saying's from the 90s, Rey.'

'Sure, Jan.'

'Smart-ass. Listen, I just wanted to make sure - ' 

“Ditto, Rey.” “I just really like you.” “Ditto, Rey.” ’

‘Rey – ‘

‘ “Great choice, Ben.” “Ditto, Rey.” ’

He was blushing now, but there was no way she was letting him live this down.

‘Rey, can we be serious – ‘

‘”Nice job on the free weights, Ben, I really enjoyed watching you handle them.” “Ditto, Rey.”’

‘It’s not my fault, my brain froze, I needed to be sure, Rey, that you want this – ’

And she kept laughing even as she hauled him close enough to her to close his mouth with her kiss. And she was so, so glad, that he’d stashed the university-supplied bed in the closet and had hauled in a queen-sized bed of his own. The room had barely been big enough for it, but he’d braced it against the wall under the window, and made do without a desk. He’d need the extra room, she’d thought at the time, and it was true, he was excessively sized at 6 foot 3 and broad with it, he’d have never fit in the standard dorm bed, he barely fit in the standard dorm _room._ And in this moment, she thanks the gods who watch over horny university students for that, thinking that, yes, they’d definitely need the extra room, even as he hauled her down into the bed with him.

She was kissing him and he was kissing her and it was just as sweet as before, just so perfectly sweet and then, just in that moment, he slanted his mouth on hers just to change the angle and it hit perfectly, and the sweetness just turned, so, so hot. So hot, she just had to whimper, the small sound echoing softly through the small room as his slanted over hers again and again, her lips parting without thought to let him and his tongue stroking against hers in a way she’d never found all that hot until just that moment.

It was too much, this sensation, and she had to break away to breathe, even as his mouth again found that pulse point between her shoulder and her neck, and this time she couldn’t help but arch into it as she struggling to keep breathing. Face burning, _it was so hot_ , she buried it his chest even as he shifted and she realized she’d somehow ended up on top of him, his chest a perfect, natural resting place to act as her pillow as she struggled to control the shivers running through her body like lightning. Spying the way in which the lobes of his ear had peeked out from underneath his shaggy hair, she leaned in to suckle gently at the nearest one, delighting in the shivers she felt coursing through him in return.

She’d long since given up any pretense of not wanting to bury her hands in his hair, and she realized, as she played with it now, those the long dark brown strands, almost raven in the dim light of the room, that brushed his collar, that she would have given in eventually at some point. It was such _soft_ hair – and really who gave him the right to go around with that silky hair without expecting her to touch it? So she buries her hands in it, tugs on it, buries her face in the angle where _his_ shoulder and neck meet so she can get a good angle as she continues to suck on the velvet lobe of his ear. Because, oh, she loves the way he moves under her when she does that. 

She’s rocking herself into him fully now, anxious to get closer and to get some friction, feel him as he moves against and squeezes her so tight she’d not sure she’ll ever breathe again. And even then, she can _feel_ it when his hand just slips under the edge of where her shirt and her pyjama bottoms meet and he gently, so gently rubs his thumb over the indentation at her seam of her hipbone. She’s so sensitive there, she hadn’t even realized it, and she bites him reflexively in reaction, though she manages to keep it to a love bite despite herself.

‘So good,’ she hears herself slur and gods, it is.

She feels his lips smirk against her neck and she’s about to punish him for that when he pushes her shirt all the way up for his wandering hands to follow the line of her spine while he’s mouthing at her collarbone and she can’t help but moan. She’s almost desperate to get her shirt off, and as she struggles to get free of his arms to push it up and over her head, she looks down at him and oh, yes, he is totally fuckable, with this plush lips and the dark hair and the amber brown eyes which are blown so wide right now they are practically black. Tossing her shirt on the floor, she dives back in, but now he has full access to her upper body, and his hands are on her breasts before she makes it all the way back down to him, and if she loved his hands before, now she may never let him take them off her. 

At least she thinks so before suddenly his mouth is on her there, twisting to kiss every inch of her right breast but never the way she needs it, teasing around the edges, making circles around the edge with his tongue and swiping across her nipple way, way too quickly. It's overwhelming, she has trouble concentrating on the feeling when his other hand, almost larger than her entire side, cups her left breast, alternating between squeezing oh so gently and rolling her nipple with his callused fingers. She moans, it’s heaven and hell at the same time, she needs more, and finally she’s able to edge that clever mouth into the proper position and finally, finally, he’s sucking the way she needs to, alternating between one breast and the other with the exact pressure she’d dreamt of. She moans, and she can feel his grin more than see it, given that his head is buried in her chest.

‘Shh, we don’t want to wake the others.’

It’s then she realizes that while he’d manoeuvred her so that she’s lying in his bed, lying on top of him almost, she’s still lying on the covers and she’s still half-dressed, and that. Will. Not. Do. Shifting to the side, she manages to get enough leverage, ignoring his pout as she moves quickly to strip out of her pyjamas. Finally free of everything, she accepts his silent invitation to get under the covers as he lifts up the duvet enough to snuggle her way in. And then, finally, she’s fully naked, fully in his bed, _finally_ , and she can press herself completely into him. Her hair gets caught in his arm momentarily and it’s almost too hot under the duvet given how heat he gives off and how much she feels like she's burning up, but she knows these are problems that will soon resolve themselves, and sure enough, they find the right position almost immediately. Within moments she’s pushing aside the duvet, grateful for the cool air that flows across her skin, as the goosebumps sprout across her skin, from the momentary cold and the ongoing sensation of his touch. They're both free from the covers, now, and this way she’s free to climb fully onto him, and this, _this_ , is what she wanted. He’s touching almost every part of her, shifting her easily even from his half-seated position, so that he can get the angle he wants. He's free this way, to worship her breasts with his mouth the way he wants, and she’s grinding herself against him while she pants, trying in vain to get enough oxygen into her lungs.

It’s a lost cause, and then he shifts suddenly, to put her almost under him, caging her between his bent elbows with her at his mercy as he lowers himself onto her to line them up and she arches into his kiss even as she almost wishes he wasn't so careful to keep the majority of his weight off of her.

‘This needs to go,’ she whispers insistently, pulling at his t-shirt, and he pulls it off one-handed and tosses it on the floor in an instant as she lets her eyes and her hands and her mouth worship his chest, tracing all of it she can touch, and it’s his turn to moan, and she just glories in the power, to have this man bend completely at her will. Loving the feeling, she’s about to insist he lose the bottoms he’s still wearing, though she can still feel the length of him through them, but even as her hands are dipping down past the elastic band to explore this new territory and get her hands on him, he suddenly shifts. Suddenly, she’s lying in the crook of his arm while his other hand drifts down her body to find her center even as her legs spread open in invitation, and it should feel awkward, lying open and vulnerable with him like this, but if anything, it's like they can't get there fast enough.

‘Need to watch you come, sweetheart. Wanna watch. Can you do that for me? Have to be _quiet_ , so, so, quiet, but you can do it. Let me help you, sweetheart, let me watch. Need to watch your face as you come for me. Watch as you arch into me, your little nipples begging for my tongue.’

‘Fuck,’ she whispers in return, barely able to hold it together as he whispers all the filthy things he’s going to do her in her ear between the assaults his mouth is making on those tender spots behind her jaw and under her ear, his free hand still busy playing with her nipples. He's alternating between one and the other, but never in enough of a pattern for her to anticipate it, instead driving her crazy wondering where he’s going to go next. Meanwhile, she’s already so wet, his finger slips right into her, pumping into her and gathering enough wetness to make it slippery as he edges around and around her clit, making her see stars when he hits it.

‘Please,’ she begs when she can’t take it anymore, though she’s sure it’s only been minutes. Her hands scramble for purchase, and though the right one nestles in his hair, there's just no safe place for her left, so she clutches the sheet and twists, trying to deal with the tension. She just can’t handle it, and she arches into him, wanting more and more friction as her body screams for firmer pressure where his hands are still teasing over her. 

‘Please. Please. God – yes, _please_.’

‘There we go, there’s my girl, just like that, you’re going to come for me, baby, aren’t you? That’s my girl, just come for me. Just got to be quiet. The door's still open, remember? You left it open a little bit. Got to be quiet while I make you come.’

She arches into him, grabbing his hair and just –

‘Please.’

‘There’s my sweetheart, you’re doing so good, baby, so, so good. Come for me, baby, just let go. Let me see you come for me. Come for me while I play with your clit and these pretty, pretty tits. Come for me and then I’ll make sure I come all over them later, make a mess of this pretty little body before I fuck you with my tongue. With my cock. Feel you come with me in you.’

‘God – ‘

‘That’s right, just like that, I'll make you scream later, you're doing so good, just taking my fingers –‘

And that’s it, just that little affirmation, and she shatters as he works her through it, kissing and stroking, his mouth slanted over hers to capture all her little sounds, and fuck, she feels light as a feather and fucking fantastic as she drifts down in his arms and he strokes her even as she arches her back away a little from the over-stimulation.

‘So good, baby,’ he whispers again and again in her ear as he cuddles her close, his grip so tight it’s one step shy of painful, and drops little kisses on the skin of her face and her neck and into her hair, draping the duvet back over the two and nesting them back into where it meets the wall.

She whimpers as he cuddles her close and tells her to sleep now.

‘Not time yet,’ she tells him, even as she yawns, the events of the day and the impact of the orgasm catching up with her, but her shushes her.

‘Later, sweetheart. Just sleep now. I’ve got you, just sleep now. Time later.’

‘Ben,’ she whines, trying to turn to face him, but he’s insistent, and it feels so good cuddled up in his arms.

‘Later,’ he soothes here. ‘When we’re both not more drunk than sober and we don’t have worry about who hears us. I want to take my time with you. I want to hear you feel it. I hope to hell the apartment you picked has soundproofed walls, baby, because we’re going to need them.’

She smiles as she drifts off in his bed, exactly where she’d always wanted to be, as she tells him the good news about 1970s construction.

They built everything in concrete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The HEA's implied, I think, but where's the fun in that?


	6. Tip up your cup and throw your hands up

The morning of their housewarming party, Rey sat at their kitchen table / island and chopped the ingredients for their morning omelette, ‘supervising’ as Ben ran around like a madman emptying boxes. He moved surprising quickly for a large man, she’d always thought so, and by the time the vegetables, ham and cheese were ready to go, he already had a neat pile of broken down cardboard boxes sitting by the door for the recycling and the number of boxes to be emptied had shrunk considerably. She smiled up at him as he reached down to claim her hard-earned work to be added to the sauté pan, teasing him a little bit that she was claiming credit for making breakfast that morning. 

‘Whatever you say, sweetheart,’ he told her as he beat the eggs he was preparing to toss the ingredients in, though he’d already rewarded her for her hard work by leaning all the way down to kiss her deep enough to have her rethinking her need for breakfast. 

His feet were still bare, sticking out of the bottoms of his plaid pyjama bottoms and she was sure she saw a tiny oil stain on the hem of his favourite black Tragically Hip t-sheet. He’d almost forgotten she was there, she could tell since he’d tucked his hair behind each of his glorious ears, those wonderful ears that he hated and did his best to hide (which is why she insisted on nibbling them) on display. Meanwhile, the hair in question was standing up in every different direction and stuck up at the base of his crown where it had gone since he’d slept on it and which she’d messed it around thoroughly in any case earlier that morning. Between his ears being on full display, his hair being everywhere and the fact that he was actually bouncing, dancing to the music that drifted through their small apartment from the radio on the counter that they'd set to the nineties station at his insistence, yes, she could well believe that he'd almost forgotten she was there. Or maybe he simply knew that she loved him, no matter how goofy he was sometimes.

‘Alright,’ he told her as he watched the mixture sizzle in the pan and she got up to deal with the coffee machine, which had beeped to indicate that the nectar of the gods was good to go. Pouring his black as he liked it, she handed it over, resisting the urge to remind him that it would taste so much better with the hazelnut cream she was currently doctoring hers with. ‘We’re going to need a game plan if we’re going to get all this ready before people start getting here. I don’t know about everyone else, but if my mother is not here precisely fifteen minutes after four I’ll be shocked. And she's likely to bring enough food to feed an army, even though I told her we've got it covered.’

It had only taken them two weeks to set a date for their housewarming, which should have given them more than enough time to get organized, and yet, unsurprisingly here they were, the morning of their first official event as a couple, and the house was still unpacked. They already had enough food to feed twice the number of confirmed guests, thanks to Rey’s need to have everyone stuffed full before leaving (and more was apparently to come), the booze and non-alcoholic drinks were chilling and Ben had tracked the invites and RSVPs with the same precision she’d used to admire in his study notes she’d gotten a peak at. All their friends from university were coming, a scattering of his family, a few of her new work friends and even an acquaintance or two from First Order Law. At Rey’s suggestion, they’d even invited all the neighbours they’d met, even if Ben had groaned (ironically, she was sure) at having even more people in his house. (Still, it was a sensible precaution as he’d agreed, just in case the walls weren’t quite as thick and as noise cancelling as she'd promised. Still. Concrete. She had to say: It rocked.)

‘Right. Food. Check. Booze. Check. Non-alcoholic drinks. Check. Really, Ben, you can relax. We just need to finish unpacking and get ready and we should be cool. Worst case scenario, we throw everything in the closet in my room and call it a day. It’s not anyone is going to care or even notice.’

‘Rey.’

‘Ben.’

‘First of all, your closet should never be seen as storage. It’s your space. It’s not overflow.’

They’d gone with her plan in the end, and ended up paying fifty dollars less than the advertised rent for the two bedroom thanks to Ben’s negotiation skills, which meant that between the price and the fact they'd let their outside gym memberships lapse, it had actually been just under the budget they’d originally set. (It had been a bit unnerving, to be honest, to watch her teddy bear of a boyfriend turn into a cold ruthless shark the moment the building’s rep had walked into the room. A bit unnerving, though also, if she was honest, also unnervingly hot. They’d had to park in a secluded parkade she knew of on the way back to the university so they could have sex in the back seat of his car and she blushed every time they drove past that parkade. It had been at the same time the least comfortable and hottest sexual experience of her life. She was secretly thinking they could revisit that experience at some point in the _very_ near future.)

Going with the two bedrooms had meant they had more living space and it also meant that she felt like she was moving into her own, adult, place for the first time. Ben had wanted to make sure she never felt like the place was anything but hers, that she would never feel like she had to question in any way how she belonged. So they’d gone with the two bedroom apartment, furnished her room completely with a queen bed and matching end tables and a dresser and all that she could ever want. (A graduation gift he’d claimed, and she’d been too distracted by the look in his eye to argue in the middle of the Nordic chain store he’d dragged her to when it became apparent that left to her own devices she might never get around to furnishing her ‘living’ space.) And her room was lovely, and she was grateful for it and grateful for how thoughtful he was. She really was. Even if she’d never slept in that brand new bed and even if she’d never slipped between the crisp new _matching_ sheets she’d found online at 70 % off and even if she pictured his bed whenever she thought of home.

‘It’s fine, Ben, you know most of my stuff is in your closet anyway.’ 

It had been easier that way, she’d told him, when her clothes had ended up in his closet that first weekend they moved in. She hadn’t been able to get to her closet at that point, and she could always move her stuff later. (It was later, now, but her stuff showed no sign of moving.) Not that there was much, anyway, his work attire dwarfed hers in quantity and quality. She didn't really care that much anyway since her office was so casual she thinks they’re just happy she doesn’t show up in sweat pants ninety percent of the time. (And yes, she’d assured Ben, that did, in fact, happen. See also: climbing gear. See also: yoga pants.) It made her happy, in any case, to see her clothes hanging neatly besides his, and she thinks it makes him happy, too, even as he bends over backward to make sure she is comfortable in _their_ place, that she has a place of her own, and that it's not just someone else's apartment she’s moving into.

‘Rey - ‘

‘You know this would be easier if you’d let me get up at four to get started,’ she told him, deciding it was best at this point to go on the offensive.

‘Please. You had no intention of unpacking. You just wanted to burn off some nervous energy with a morning run.’

‘Well, you can’t say I didn’t burn off some energy.’ 

Waking in his bed at four that morning, she'd quickly realized she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, so she’d decided a morning run would actually help, with the nerves. There a lot of people coming, to check out her new space, their new space, and it wasn't like her friends and his wouldn't love it, but it was just - Biting her lip, she reminded herself not to be nervous, she'd found it hard to fall back asleep. Giving up, she'd gone to more carefully out from under his arm, as she’d decided to sneak out before he woke, knowing he would insist on coming with her given the hour, even if he didn’t want to go for a run himself. She’d just decided to leave him a text to wake to, even if she planned to be back before that even happened. 

Her feet had never made it to the floor. 

The arm casually draped over her waist had tightened the moment she shifted to leave the warm bed, and the moment he cuddled her into him, she'd thought of all sorts of different ways to work off some energy. Since moving in together, she'd found out that Ben was really, really turned on by morning sex, which had worked out quite nicely for her, given the erection he usually woke with.

_‘Hmm. Morning snack.’_

_‘Ben - ‘_

_‘What time is it?’_

_‘Four?’_

_If anything, his arm had only tightened further._

_‘Four? What are you doing trying to get out of bed? Still dark out.’_

_‘Going to - ‘_

_‘Shush. Stay safe in bed. With me. Warm. Safe,’ he told her again, his voice slurred with sleep, his face now buried into her neck._

_At which point she said screw it. He was just too tempting for words. As she burrowed back in, though, and his nose nuzzled into the point she loved so much, the nervous energy she’d felt since they’d confirmed for the date of the shindig they were throwing the next day, no wait - today. All of their friends were coming. His parents were coming. Hell, his whole family was coming. And yes, okay, she’d met pretty much all of them at this point, but the fact remained that everyone who was important to them were coming to their house for the first time._

_This entire week she'd been buzzing with so adrenaline it felt like she’d been vibrating._

_‘Ben,’ she whispered quietly, but not too quietly. ‘You awake?’_

_‘Humph.’_

_Maybe she should just… she gave a bit of an experimental wiggle, mostly under the pretense of snuggling closer, her backside accidentally nudging into his groin. She was rewarded as the hand that was wrapped around her waist had migrated to cup her breast, the firm grasp making her sigh happily a little._

_‘Fuck, I love your hands.’_

_‘Babe,’ he slurred a little, and she knew he was on the verge of waking up._

_Progress, she thought, and wriggled a little bit more, feeling the results in the erection that was now digging into her ass. He was only half-hard at that point, but he was clearly waking up by the second, his warm body folding her inch by inch. His nose had been replaced by this point by the lips she loved that were sucking small love bites into her neck and under her ear lobe. And as she felt his other hand drift lower to press insistently at her centre, she shifted happily to let it drift over the curly hair at the junction of her thighs before unerringly finding her core, still damp from the night before and getting damper with every press of his magic fingers._

_‘Wet for me already, baby?’_

_‘Woke up feeling that way,’ she whispered as she arched further into him, loving the way the hand on her breast and the lips at her neck had both increased their firm pressure. Reaching behind her to slide her first lightly up and down his generous cock, feeling the way it swelled with every light touch even as she increased her rhythm. Fuck. He was definitely awake now, and she was loving it._

_‘Still dark.’_

_‘Don’t need a lot of light to find him, do I?’ she whispered back, neither seeming to want to disturb the warm cocoon of the night that surrounded them_

_‘Umm.’_

_‘Think he wants to come out and play? Sure feels like it.’_

_‘Feels more like he wants to slide into you, baby. Feels like I’m going to make you shudder and come so hard, going to fuck you so bad you’re going to sleep like a good girl until I tell you it’s time to wake up instead of trying to sneak out of my bed in the middle of the night.’_

_And then his hand was gone from her cunt even as hers was knocked out of place on him as he slid into her from behind. His other hand kept his firm grip on her breast while the one that had just been sliding through her wet centre took its place on her hip to hold her steady as he slowly rocked into her, a little at a time, the tip just nudging in before the rest followed, until finally they were flush and she felt the sigh on her neck and his nose in her hair as he seated himself fully into her._

_‘Feels so good, sweetheart, being buried in you, so good, so fucking good.’_

_‘Fuck, Ben - ‘_

_‘That’s right, just arch your back a little bit, baby, fuck. Just like that. Going to fill you up, fuck. So tight.’_

_She arched her back to get just that little bit closer, turning her head so she could kiss him the way she wanted, messy and wet and sloppy and with too much tongue, as he rocked into her over and over. His finger had drifted to her clit again, making her shiver as she arched in response, so she reached over to grab his hip, urging him deeper and harder._

_‘Fuck.’_

_‘That’s the idea, sweetheart.’_

_Even with him in her, with them rocking together is his massive, warm bed, she couldn’t help but laugh._

_‘Smart-ass.’_

_‘Gotta burn off those nerves, baby. Going to make you come so hard you're going to forget everything but my name.’_

He had. She'd forgotten everything but his name as she'd whispered it over and over into his ear. And as Rey watched him now, as he cooked a serious omelette in their kitchen and bounced his feet unconsciously to the Hip, shooting her a crooked grin every once in a while, as his massive frame, still too big for the space but still comfortable in it, moved confidently to feed her, as her body still hummed a little from that morning _and_ the night before, she had to concede that, as a technique for burning off nerves went, his way was superior. Hell, maybe she should just give up running and start every morning like that. It certainly made for a more _enjoyable_ morning. 

‘Told you.’

She sputtered, half the coffee she’d been drinking going straight out her nose. 

‘What?’

‘The unpacking. It’s basically done. I say we finish cleaning, go for a run, and then clean off in the shower. Although I’m not sure how much hot water we’ll get. We may have to clean each other.’

‘Clean each other up? Or get each other dirty?’

‘Why not both?’ he told her, granting her that crooked Cheshire cat grin and she laughed again. 

‘You’re such a liar. You were the one worried about getting the unpacking done, not me.’

‘Well, yeah, but now I’ve had coffee. And I was thinking about getting each other... _clean_ again.’

 _‘Perv_.’

She could hardly blame him, she couldn’t wait to get clean, with him, too. 

‘Okay. We eat, we unpack. Anything that doesn't get done in an hour goes in my closet. Then we go with the rest of your plan. And if you're a good boy,’ she told him with a exaggerated wink, feeling warm and fed and loved, ‘I’ll clean you from head to toe. With my tongue.’

She’d never seen a man eat quite that fast.

***

It was a small apartment, all things considered, but even so, Rey would never have any problem tracking Leia Organa. The diminutive woman had a laugh that was meant to be heard, and her husky voice somehow made itself heard without raising itself more than a decibel. A remarkable woman, Rey, thought, and it was easy to see why she'd command any room she walked into. From what she understood, Leia had been doing it for decades.

 _It wasn’t that, though_ , Rey thought. 

It was the way you could see the ripples as people reacted to her presence wherever she went. That was certainly the case with her husband, Han, who seemed to delight in being close to her as much as he enjoyed needling her at every opportunity ( _sure, Princess_ she’d accidentally caught him whispering in her ear), almost as if to ensure he always had her attention, Rey thought. Opposites in so many ways, Han Solo and Leia Organa had somehow managed to overcome the odds, even in the face of the challenges presented by time, circumstance and their son's misspent youth. Even when the two of them were positioned across the room, you could still see the connection between the two of them, almost as if it was a physical, tangible cord that vibrated just slightly at all times. Rey had caught them communicating silently several times, likely the result of being married so many years, though she had to wonder if they'd been drawn to each other from the beginning. From the way Leia leaned subconsciously into her husband's touch at every opportunity, and the way Han's eyes followed his wife around the room, she thought so. Ben had told her his father deferred to his mother whenever possible, and truly, he seemed as fascinated as everyone else with Leia's every move. 

She couldn’t blame him. She’d fallen for Leia Organa the moment she’d walked into her home, a pleased smile on her lips and food in her arms. 

_‘I love what you’ve done with the place, Rey. It has warmth. Not exactly what I’d expect from this lump,’ she’d told her while she and Ben had given her the grand tour, though, as always with her son, she softened her teasing with a smile. ‘Maybe that’s the reason why he’s so much less of a grump, lately, hmm?’_

Even as Ben’s cheeks had heated, Rey had laughed, impulsively reaching out to hug the tiny woman so determined to welcome her son’s love into her life.

It wasn't just Han, though. It was almost as bad with everyone else, whether it be Leia’s old friends Amilyn Holdo, and Maz or Ben’s uncles, her brother Luke, and Chewie and Lando, who always seemed to find a way to drift into her orbit, or even Ben and Rey’s former classmates, who clustered around Ben’s mother as if in disbelief that they were in the presence of the living legend of whom they’d heard so much. 

Ultimately, though, it was Ben, Rey thought. She would always know where Leia was located in any room simply based on Ben’s smile. He’d told her of his past, of his fractured relationship with his parents, the way he’d rejected them, everything they’d stood for, their entire value system, to act as Snoke’s right hand for almost a decade. He’d also told her that when he’d shown up on the doorstep of his family home, hat in hand but chip on shoulder (metaphorically speaking) last year, they’d simply welcomed him home with gratitude and joy. And hugs. So many hugs. (No matter how much Ben grumbled about hugs now, she thought, she saw how much he smiled when his family embraced him now, and she made a mental note to add copious amounts of loving touches and hugs to her daily routine with him, no matter how uncomfortable she sometimes was with PDA.)

Han had told her quietly that Leia had held on to Ben so long and so hard he’d been tempted to intervene, worried that Ben might snap in half being forced to contort his frame that far down for so long. Looking at how her six foot three boyfriend had to lean all the way down to listen to his petite mother, barely five foot one in her stockinged feet, a large arm around her shoulder to keep her close, Rey almost chuckled out loud at the mental image.

‘They look good together, don’t they?’ Han mused quietly now, standing next to her as he raided liberally from the bowl of tortilla chips Rey had just refilled, claiming the bowl of guacamole in a proprietary manner as if someone might snag it from his grasp. ‘Always a little worried that she’s going to cut off that boy’s oxygen if she doesn’t loosen her grip, though.’

Rey laughed, snagging the bowl back from him before pouring him a generous dose of his favourite dip into one of the personal side dishes she’d set out at Ben’s suggestion and handing it over to him. 

‘They do. It’s good to see them together. Nice to have you here.’

They still made her nervous, Ben’s parents, though he always told her they loved her from the moment she’d first come to Thanksgiving last year. It was easier to relax around Han, though, maybe since , he was so Han about it, about her and Ben, that she almost thought she’d no choice other than to be at ease with him. 

‘Stick with me, kid. We’ll loosen them up in no time,’ he told her now as he bumped her shoulder with his, stuffing his face with her homemade guacamole and watching his small family with soft brown eyes.

*** 

They all stayed up late, that night, laughing as the golden spring sun spilling into the tiny apartment turned into soft dusk and then the soft moonlight of late May, the traffic of the downtown settling into a soft hum outside. As their group surged and changed, as people left and people came, as they spilled in small groups and then larger ones and then back into smaller ones, out on the balcony and then back into the living room, and then gathered in the small kitchen, as people are always wont to do, as they ebbed and flowed around the centre that was Ben Solo and Rey Johnson and the tiny home they’d created as they came together and as they separated again to join different groups, Rey caught glimpses of new friendships and old. 

Of Rose arguing with a tall redhead from Ben’s old office, all up in his face with her finger perilously close to his nose, even as he glared down at her from his considerable height, almost towering over her with over a foot in advantage. It didn’t seem to matter to her. She was giving considerably more than she got, and the growl emanating from the redhead didn’t seem to phase her in the slightest. Rey wasn’t entirely sure, but it sure looked from her angle like digits were likely to be exchanged. From the look in that boy's eye, he was half exasperated, half smitten.

Jannah and Paige had found their way back together again, which would have surprised absolutely no one, and were apparently badgering Ben’s Uncle Chewbacca for guitar lessons, and also trying to convince him to post various music posts on Tik Tok of all things. Rey was certain she’d heard mention of how he’d surely go ‘viral’ and, given his talent and his reassuring vibe, even with the fact that he looked a bit like an overgrown fuzzy teddy bear, what with all the hair, she wouldn’t be surprised. 

Leia was schooling Kaydel on the best way to take selfies, apparently, demonstrating with one arm around her husband and one around her son, Han's other arm around his brother-in-law Luke, while Zori was shooting her suggestions from across the room, where she was following Maz’s instructions as to how to make the perfect cucumber gin and tonic under Amilyn Holdo’s careful supervision. (And yes, her arrival with Han and Leia had sent half of the room into a small tizzy, but after making a careful public disclaimer that all of their final grades had been submitted and that they had all gotten exactly what they’d earned _and_ that they were all adults, Amilyn had fit right in.) All the occupants of the kitchen were determinedly ignoring Lando’s attempts to flirt, though Rey noticed that they did spend a fair amount of time laughing at his obvious attempts to charm them, which seemed to indicate that they weren't that put out with him. Meanwhile Zorii had pointed out several times, loudly, that he was even older than her father. ( _That stings, young woman_ , he’d retorted. _Thankfully I’m the exact right age for these two beauties right here_ , he'd told here, indicating Maz and Amily. When Maz had laughed in his face, her deep raspy laugh echoing through the kitchen, Rey had nearly done a spit take). 

Through the sliding doors leading to the balcony she could see Phasma and Bazine take Rey’s new building super, Dopheld Mitaka, to school regarding the intricacies of tenant law. It was too far away for her to see, but it was possible he was smiling. 

Reassured that everything was well in hand, Rey snuggled into the couch next to Finn, her oldest friend, watching in fascination as he flirted easily with Poe Dameron, who’d apparently known Ben since their childhood when their mothers had worked together in Legal Aid. Distracted by Leia's laugh, which rang again across the room, Finn turned his attention to watch the small Skywalker-Organa-Solo family from where they sat, before he smiled down at her as she rested her head on his shoulder.

'So, what do you think?' she asked him, pleasantly buzzed and wrapped in the evening light. She didn't see him enough, hadn't since they'd left for universities continents apart, though she was hopeful as he'd just announced his intention to move to the neighbouring city, less than three hours down the road. She was hopeful she would see him more, now, especially how much he had enjoyed meeting her new friends, her new family, and the sparks that had shot out the minute he'd started talking to Poe. 

'The apartment or the guy? Or both?'

'Obviously the apartment is superior,' she laughed gently, feeling him hmm of agreement beneath her ear as she gestured vaguely over to where Ben and his parents were standing. 'Ben, too. I meant it all, this life, my job, this city, this apartment, _them_. I did good.'

'You did good, peanut,' he affirmed, smiling.

They sat a moment, in silence, thinking of how different their lives were from what they could possibly have imagined. Wondering how they'd managed to end up _here_ , across the pond and curled up tight in her little apartment with everyone who meant anything to her. She had everything she needed, here, and everyone.

‘They’re a little bit complicated, aren’t they?’ Finn remarked, musing, referring to her new in-laws.

Meeting her boyfriend’s wry smile from across the room, where he seemed about five minutes from signalling her to rescue him, Rey couldn’t help but agree. Han, Luke and Leia all had oversized personalities to begin with, as did Ben for that matter, as quiet as he was. Once you threw in the other members of his extended found family, those family friends who'd apparently been part of the Solo orbit for decades, you had quite the dynamic. She knew she'd have to find a way to make a spot for herself, in that dynamic, and a little spot for _them_ \- her and Ben. She didn't doubt it would be challenging, but she'd never backed from a challenge and she'd no intention of doing so now. She was tired of putting her life on hold. She was tired of waiting. It was time to find her own happy ending.

‘Yup. All families are complicated though, aren’t they?’

‘True. Even ours.’

That was an understatement if there ever was one.

‘Especially ours. Fun, though.’

Finn tipped his glass a little, in that age-old gesture, and she tapped it lightly with her own. 

‘Damn skippy.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Side note: verb tenses are HARD, but there you have it, my fluffy roommates fic that somehow went over 20k. There's a lesson there; I had originally planned for 6-8k. 
> 
> Hopefully you enjoyed and thank you all for coming along with me on this silly, fluffy ride!

**Author's Note:**

> I'm at [@RandomBks](https://twitter.com/RandomBks) if you want to say hi.


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